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Premiums for European farmers sound good, but they come with a catchUnder the European Union's reformed Common Agricultural Policy, farmers will be paid as much as $225 for each acre of arable land, even if they stop growing crops and sell all the livestock. But governments are using this reform to impose more controlsby NORMAN DUNNIt sounds like the farmer's ultimate dream: a permanent subsidy for each acre, no matter what is done with the land. Under the current reform of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), as much as $225 Cdn is to be paid as a premium for each acre of arable land, even if the farmer stops growing crops and sells all the livestock. Trees can be planted, a wildlife park founded or the land simply left to go wild with the "farmer" moving into town and spending his annual premium there.That's the theory anyway. France immediately saw the danger of the last option and kept the old system of linking subsidy payments to production for 100 per cent of beef breeding herds and 25 per cent of crop area. "Retaining the link with production has been a wise move," Arnaud Vecten, an arable farmer in the department of Picardy, told me. "Otherwise we might have had a mass exodus from poorer-producing areas. Also, there's an undercurrent of suspicion that a single farm payment entirely unconnected with crop and livestock production could be whittled away by successive governments under pressure from non-farming taxpayers who regard the payments as money for doing nothing." Certainly, governments throughout Europe are using this reform to impose more controls on farmers. This is to be done through so-called "cross-compliance" and it works like this. From now on, farmers have to follow more environmental protection, food safety and animal welfare rules. Each country is just now setting out its lists of requirements, including protection of woodlands and wildlife but also the following of "good agricultural practices" in the farm business. Cross-compliance activities can earn extra subsidies -- for the establishment of a small wildlife biotope on the farm, for instance. Ignoring cross-compliance requirements, on the other hand, will lead to reduction in the farm's premium. Requirements for arable units introduced this year in France included the demand that at least three crops had to be included in the rotation. Also required were uncultivated and unsprayed "wild flower" margins at least five metres in width around fields, lakes and along waterways. This was a step too far for French farmers, who lost no time in launching a nationwide campaign against what they saw as outright government meddling in their freedom to farm. As we all know, French farmers don't mess about when it comes to protesting and so the Paris government quickly backed down. A revised list of requirements has been presented. There are now no restrictions on rotations, and even monoculture systems are allowed. Wild flower margins are only for waterways. Farmers can leave up to 30 per cent of their land fallow. If more than this is left unproductive, the farm premium is cut by 25 per cent. The worrying aspect of the new reforms is that many countries have followed France's lead and broken away from the original concept of a single farm payment unconnected with production, introducing hybrid schemes to suit their own political requirements. The result is no longer a Common Agricultural Policy but, as one leading European farm journalist put it, "Agriculture a la carte". In Germany, for example, 2005 will see the introduction of a scale of regional premiums with uniform payments per acre of cropland in each state based on an average of the old subsidies. Beef cattle production will continue to earn an individual premium based on production, but this will also become a uniform per acre payment in 2012. Perhaps the violent reaction to attempted rotation control in France has been noted, because, so far at least, there is to be no meddling in the cropping systems. And there's no doubt that the German government is as suspicious as its opposite number in France that traditional farming might in some cases be abandoned under the reform. The "good farming practice" requirement is prominent in the German cross-compliance safeguards. As in most other countries, a limit to fertilizer application on land is another of the regulations: no more than 68 kilograms of nitrogen per acre. For more protection of ground water, there's to be no spreading of manure during winter and at least six months' storage capacity for livestock manure must be established on stock farms. Germany also wants special measures to protect areas of farms valuable for bird life and wild plants.
But, whatever the country, the bottom line of the new CAP reform and cross-compliance is a substantial increase in government and European Union control of individual farming businesses. The new permanent "decoupled" subsidy may no longer be fully linked with production, but it represents an annual, easily accessible, sum liable to instant reduction with every infringement made on the new regulations. BF Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.
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